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An opera star on the fast track

CULTURE BEAT | PAMELA FEINSILBER At only 25, opera singer and neighborhood resident Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen has already had a head-spinning career.  Cohen graduated from Princeton in 2015. Just two years later, he was one of 12 artists to join S.F. Opera’s prestigious two-year, performance-oriented Adler Fellowship Program, which is what brought him to San…

Yet Another Hole in the Head

FILM | ANDREA CHASE The 16th Annual Another Hole in the Head Film Festival, brought to you by the fine people at SFIndieFest, gathers a scintillating collection of the best of the genres of sci-fi, horror, fantasy and just plain odd films currently out there, along with the now traditional rescoring of a classic. The…

Buster Keaton on Divisadero

FILM | CLASSICS SHOT LOCALLY Atop the crest of the hill on Divisadero Street, looking north between Pacific and Broadway, a car slowly makes a U-turn, then stops on the opposite side of the street. Buster Keaton filmed almost exclusively on Hollywood lots, but traveled to San Francisco to get this one shot.  The first…

Alfred Hitchcock on Buchanan

FILM | CLASSICS SHOT LOCALLY Walking north on Buchanan Street across Sacramento, you hardly notice the home on the corner. Built in 1900, this sheepish three-story house seems to endeavor not to draw attention to itself. But Alfred Hitchcock saw it differently. It was here that he filmed climactic scenes of his very last film,…

Sonny Lewis performing at the Fillmore street fair in 1992 with bassist Charles Thomas and drummer Jack Dorsey.

Fillmore’s own Sonny Lewis

NEW RELEASE | SCOTT YANOW Sonny Lewis is a jazz legend who almost slipped away into history. A superior tenor-saxophonist and flutist based in the San Francisco Bay Area since the early 1960s, Lewis made relatively few jazz recordings during his career. He can be heard with Smiley Winters (playing next to altoist Sonny Simmons…

A concert series in an Arts & Crafts treasure

CULTURE BEAT | PAMELA FEINSILBER Andrew Dodd lives nowhere near the neighborhood, but he’s brought something special to it. Dodd created the Second Sunday Concert Series at the Swedenborgian Church, at Washington and Lyon Streets, offering live music in the stunning 1895 Arts & Crafts-style church. You live in Concord. How did you get involved…

Fighting as a metaphor for peace

FILM | ANDREA CHASE Italian-born neighborhood resident Pietro Pinto didn’t set out to make a film about boxers. After winning a place in the Jerusalem Film Workshop a few years back, he arrived in Israel for the first time in his life with less than two weeks to find a subject for his short film,…

24 years on retreat

FILM | JESSICA BERNSTEIN-WAX My mother’s friend Judith Skinner started a Tibetan Buddhist retreat in her Pacific Heights apartment in 1995. At the time, she thought it would last the traditional three years, three months and three days. Almost 24 years later, she remains on retreat, a Buddhist practice that involves solitude, meditation and introspection…

The dancer is a choreographer

CULTURE BEAT | PAMELA FEINSILBER Myles Thatcher first came to Pacific Heights when he lived in the dorm for San Francisco Ballet School students on Jackson Street. He joined the company in 2010, and still lives nearby. As a member of the corps de ballet, he has danced in everything from Swan Lake to Balanchine…

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